I spent a while looking at cars. Looks like I need to spend at least £1,500 to get something half decent. That’s a lot of wedge. In fact, it would be the most amount of money I’d ever spent on anything ever.

So, this morning Dad (thanks!) popped over to Bridgewater and picked up a gearbox for the Polo from a breakers yard for £75. We’re going to jack up the car this afternoon, and pull out the old gearbox, then hopefully just to a straight swap. Fingers crossed that’ll get the Polo back on the road.

That gives me a bit more time to sort out a new vehicle, and would hopefully mean we could sell the Polo rather than scrapping it.

The motorbike thing is kind of a seperate issue. I think I’m still going to take my DAS course, but that’s because it’s something I really want to do – not because I think it’s a good idea to replace my car with a bike. I also think it’d be much better to grab a relatively cheap lower-powered bike and get used to riding for a while rather than jumping straight onto a stupidly powerful machine.

So, that’s the plan. Fix the Polo, get the TAX and MOT sorted at the end of April (so keeping the Polo on the road runs to about £250) then get my bike license (~£500). Once I’ve reached that stage my options are still relatively open – I reckon the Polo’s days will still be numbered (assuming this new gearbox fixes everything anyway), and replacing it will probably be the top priority. But I should be able to sell it for a couple of hundred quid… and if I can find a good value 125cc Scrambler I reckon it’d be pretty good fun on the side

On Tuesday someone asked if they could buy my car when I wanted to get rid of it. I said “Sure. She’s a good little runner, hasn’t had any real problems in the last two years”. Why did I say that? Why!!

It had to happen sooner or later. Unfortunately it happened sooner, and that’s a bit of a problem. For a few weeks now the Polo has been a bit funny about 3rd gear. It would sometimes seem to just ‘pop out’ of gear. I wasn’t sure if it was just me not putting it in gear properly or a genuine problem. It turns out it was a genuine problem, and it just got a lot worse.

I drove back from London on Thursday morning with only two gears working (on the way back from Hazels, where I’d been saying an overdue ‘bon voyage’ and helping her pack her bag for her big trip). I lost reverse, first, and third gear. They just jumped out of place when they were in gear, and if I tried to hold the gearstick forward there was some serious grinding. I figured “well… it’s basically motorway for the entire journey, so I’ll just be in 4th… so it won’t matter for this trip”.

Boy was I wrong.

I crawled around the M25, which meant constantly slowing to a stop, and then having to start again in 2nd gear. That wasn’t so bad though, I just made sure I stayed in the nearside lane so I could roll onto the hard shoulder if anything got worse. I survived that leg and stayed in 4th for the entire M4-M5 leg. No problems.

It was when I hit Bridgewater that the lack of 1st gear really proved to be a problem. Have you ever tried to pull away at a roundabout in 2nd gear? It’s not a very speedy getaway. Oh, the good old Polo could do it… but damn was it slow. Still, I managed to get back, without blowing up the engine (although I’m sure it wasn’t very good for it) and without having a single person honk or flash at me. Not bad going I thought.

I might get a mechanic to look her over, but she’s probably not worth repairing. The MOT expires at the end of the month, and the tax runs out around the same time. The odometer doesn’t work, the passenger window doesn’t work, reverse, first and third gears don’t work, and it’s been making horrible noises for quite a while… she was 20 years old. RIP Polo.

The problem is… I hadn’t realized quite how totally stranded I was in Sampford Brett without a car. I can walk to Williton and that’s about it. I can’t get to Taekwondo, I can’t get to the train station, I really can’t leave the village.

I’d already got my direct access motorcycle test booked in for the last week of April, but I’m not 100% sure if I want to totally replace having a car with a motorbike. Perhaps I do… that might be the best option. I can’t really afford to take the motorbike test and get a car. Perhaps I should just take the gamble: do the motorbike test, buy a motorbike, and see how it works out for me. If I miss having a car, I get a car a bit later on.

I don’t really want to buy another banger, if I’m going to spend my hard earned cash on a car I want something half decent. But I’m not sure it’s worth getting into debt over…

Having to buy a new vehicle suddenly makes living in the middle of nowhere seem a lot less cheap!

Well.. after not receiving the email that I was promised yesterday to confirm that the new ticket had been submitted I thought I’d better call back this morning to check. I got the following email as confirmation:

Hi this is sam from customer service at Vodafone I can now confirm that the landaus switching centre is down and you are in the area which this covers which unable you to receive incoming calls I can only apologise for the other advisors that did not report this in the correct was and for the trouble this has caused.Thankyou for your call

samantha plant
customer account manager
holditch

The complaint I phoned in yesterday was logged in my notes but not sent to the technical team. What a surprise. However, I was informed that the VF-LLANDAFF switch (aka ‘landaus’) was still broken, and the engineers are on their way to fix it. Again.

Apparently the switch is not linked to your phone number (as I was told), but is in fact dependent on the location. This is “definitely” the reason why everyone in the area is unable to receive incoming calls.

Sam very kindly acknowledged on the phone that I was “lied to” (her own words) by Vodafone customer services the previous day and that the problem with the switch probably affected “more like thousands” of people.

The saga continues…

We still can’t receive incoming phone calls in the local area. It’s been two weeks. Apparently it had nothing to do with the Llandaff switch… thinking about it now – that should have been obvious. The switch is connected to the number and not the geographical location – if it was my switch that was broken then my phone also wouldn’t work when I left Somerset. Which it does.

I spoke to Vodafone again today (I was promised an email, but I’m dubious I’ll ever get it)…they closed the original complaint. Nothing is working. It’s been 2 solid weeks.

Great. They – yet again – closed the complaint without any form of follow up. Having re-read my contract:

We will be liable to you if our negligence causes death or personal injury. In all other circumstances, we will not be liable for loss of profits or revenue, loss of use, lost business or missed opportunities, or for any loss or damage that is indirect and/or was not reasonably foreseeable at the time this Agreement was entered into.

I’m starting to wonder if beating myself to death whilst listening to their 20-second-hold-music loop would be a successful way or martyring myself for the cause?

I just got back in from a run. There’s nothing unusual about that – it’s one of the reasons that I love working from a home office. I can schedule in a 30 minute post-lunch jog. It’s good. Unfortunately what isn’t always so good is the way that Philosophy can equip you with the tools to destroy some of life’s simple pleasures.

As I was stood in the kitchen after quite a tough run and flicked the kettle on I idly though: “Ah, there’s no place like home”. I’ve always quite liked that saying and it seemed rather a suitable thought.

But did my mind stop there? Oh no. I had to go and think “well… actually…is there?”.

Which led me to the sad realization that “there’s no place like home” is actually a tautology, and I’d just never realized it before. ‘Home’ is such a fuzzy definition that if it turned out there in fact was some other place like home… well… that would be home too…

Maybe I’m the last person in the world to realize it but that doesn’t stop the world outside my window looking a little bit more gray. Until now every time someone said “there’s no place like home” I warmly thought “I like that”. Now I’m inevitably going to think “duh – that’s just silly”.

Where’s the fun in that?! Bloody philosophy.

Well… at least Vodafone are acknowledging there is a genuine problem. I phoned up this morning and was told erroneously that the issue was resolved. I phoned up again half an hour later and discovered it definitely wasn’t.

It’s now been a week without incoming calls. I’ve been compensated £20 for the inconvenience. C’mon Vodafone, sort it out..! This stopped being funny quite some time ago.

Dear Mr Swan,

I am e-mailing you as per your request in regards to the conversation we had on the 12th March.

I can confirm that since you reported the problem to us on the 7th March there have been network problems with the switch site your handset is using (VF-Llandaff) that have been acknowleged and is being worked on however at this moment in time there is no fixed time limit.

The problem with this particular site is that customers may have problems recieving calls and will either direct to voicemail or there is an automated message advising that the handset is currently unavailable.

We do appologise for any inconvenience this may have cause you.

Jennifer Holborow
(Vodafone customer Services)

In our little town of Samford Brett in Somerset we can no longer receive incoming mobile calls. This affects everyone covered by the local cell tower. To be honest, I don’t know if that’s 10 people of 10,000.

The problem will presumably be fairly quick to fix. That is – when Vodafone send the engineers to the correct tower.

As far as we can tell:

• On Monday evening the cell tower evidently went ‘wrong’
• On Tuesday nobody noticed we couldn’t receive incoming calls. We still have full signal and can call out – but all incoming calls get rejected
• On Wednesday I spent three hours convincing Vodafone there was a problem. An engineer was given the job. I was assured I would be phone back by the engineer with a report
• On Thursday I phoned for a status check and was told it was in progress
• On Friday my neighbor phoned and was told no fault had been reported

There most certainly is still a problem, so why had Vodafone closed the technical ticket?

Because they sent the engineer to the wrong tower. As a result of not finding a fault the ticket was closed, and they deemed it unnecessary to call me back as there was ‘never a problem in the first place’.

The ticket has now been reopened, and within 72 hours I might receive a call back from the engineer and, possibly, from customer services.

So far:

• Vodafone seem to need to be convinced by their customers that a tower is faulty, even though it took the customer services agent about 10 seconds to check on the system and discover there was a problem
• Vodafone are capable of sending engineers to the wrong tower
• Vodafone will not call you back if they decide that you were wrong in the first place
• Vodafone really don’t seem particularly concerned that our network is down.
• Vodafone think that £1.60 off my bill for every 24 hours the network is down is suitable compensation.

I now face a moral dilemma:

I want to send them an invoice for doing their technical support for them. But if they actually paid it would mean I worked for them… and ritual suicide seems a high price to pay for getting my point across

After wasting half my day talking to Vodafone they told me to go to the Vodafone shop in Taunton to get a new sim card, or to wait 3 days for them to post me one. Just to confirm that it wasn’t just me experiencing problems.

I, very unhappily, told them I would go and collect a sim card tomorrow.

Then I found three other people who didn’t have any incoming calls going to Vodafone. Hmmm… so that pretty much rules out the ‘just me’ theory.

IÂ called back Vodafone, went through most of the checks that we did this morning (what the hell is the point of having notes on the account if people do everything again anyway?!) and then was told they’d check the local stations.

“Oh, yes. It looks like a local station is down and not accepting calls. It wasn’t on our noticeboard. I’d better scramble an engineer. He’ll sort it out with 72 (!!!) hours and they’ll phone you back.”

Now, the thing that makes me worried about this is:

Why on Earth does Vodafone need me to tell them that they have a technical fault? Where on earth was their massive red warning that should flag up when their system can see that they have lost an entire section of their network capability?

I just realised that I’m not receiving any incoming phone calls or text messages on Vodafone in Somerset. Looks like I haven’t been doing so for at least 12 hours now.

I’m getting through to Vodafone on the house line but it’s just ringing, and rining, and rining… and then cutting out. No “we’re busy, please try again”, no hold music….

It’s not my new uber-phone playing up – I’ve tested it with my old phone to.

Vodafone, pull your thumbs out and sort out your damn act.

“Buy two pizza’s and get the second pizza half price.”It’s a pretty good deal from Pizza Hut, it’s not the most original offer, but it works.

Thankfully Pizza Hut in Brighton and Hove have put their own spin on the takeaway deal to make it a bit unique. There own nifty mathematical twist.

So when is a good deal on pizza not a good deal? Well, when you spend too long specifying the second pizza. And then it’s not half price.

Yes, that’s right. Pizza Hut truly excelled itself with that one. We ordered a pizza, hung up, realized we should have ordered two, so phoned back 20 seconds later to add the second pizza to the order.

We were then told that because we hadn’t ordered them at the same time we couldn’t get the second pizza half price. Well… that hardly seemed like a fair deal. On further questioning we were told that it “wouldn’t go through the system”.

We suggested that he canceled the first order, and put in a new order. For two pizzas. With the second one being half price. Surely that was possible?

Following much denial that this was a reasonable course of action we were then told that they could cancel, and had now canceled, the first order… the catch? That that we wouldn’t be able to get another order delivered to that address because we’d been logged as canceling an order.

The result? We ordered from Dominoes, because they weren’t being mind numbingly stupid. Pizza Hut lost the order, and the six of us that were there will enjoy laughing at their expense for years to come.

Why not apply for a job with Pizza Hut, I’m sure you’ll find it fullfilling to have so much control